A Genre Analysis Of Linguistic, Rhetoric And Move Features In The Kenyan Judicial Service Commission Job Interviews

ABSTRACT

The government of Kenya has made tremendious efforts to initiate reforms in different sectors, including the judiciary, with the aim of meeting the requirements of the new constitution promulgated in 2010. One of the components of the reforms that has received a lot of emphasis is the vetting of public office holders, that is mostly done through public interviews. The present research caried out a genre analysis of common linguistic, rhetoric and move features in the Kenyan Judicial Service Commission (JSC) interviews, conducted in 2011. Genre analysis is a subdiscipline of Applied Linguistics, which plays a major role of solving language related problems or real life problems in general. Several researches that have been carried out using Genre Analysis theory have tended to analyse different types of written and spoken texts including speeches, application letters, weblog job interviews and many others. No information is found on genre analysis of linguistic, rhetoric and move features of job interviews done publicly and is open to all stakeholders from a judicial context in Kenya. The present study therefore established a gap on genre analysis of public job interviews, especially the analysis of linguistic, rhetoric and move features. The Kenyan judiciary is one sector that has been experiencing many challenges including corruption, unfairness, injustices, incompetence and many other problems. By making the vetting process public, the government of Kenya has been making an attempt to build public confidence in the judiciary hence solve the problems that have rocked the institution of justice for decades. It is expected that the linguistic, rhetoric and move features used in the interviews by the JSC would express, promote or enhance positive values such as integrity, fairness, competence, justice, transparency and accounterbility among others. However, there are instances when some terms or expressions used by the participants in interview sessions tend to contravene, contradict or violate some of these positive values. The present study therefore set to invesigate whether the linguistic, rhetoric and move features used in the JSC job interviews in 2011 expressed, enhanced or promoted positive values as enshrined in the 2010 constitution or some of these features contradicted, contravened or violated the same values. The objectives of the study were: to describe the linguistic, rhetoric and move features used in JSC 2011 job interviews to achieve communicative purposes; to analyze how the linguistic, rhetoric and move features used in JSC job interviews expressed, enhanced or promoted positive values and; to establish whether the linguistic, rhetoric and move features used in JSC job interviews contradicted, contravined or violated the constitutional values. The study adopted the Genre Analysis theory as proposed by Swales’(1990) and as developed by Bhatia (1993). The theory highlights the move structure of any written or spoken text, the linguistic and rhetoric aspects, the communicative purposes, the discoures community, the communicative events among other concepts. Some of the tenets of the theory include: establishing a territory, that is, the context or situation, establishing a niche, that is, creating a research space by surveying the existing literature to establish a gap, occupying the niche, that is, selecting the corpus and investigating the lexicogrammatical features and text patterning. The population of the study was 10 interview texts for Chief Justice position obtained from the JSC website, of which three texts were purposively sampled for analysis. The area of study was Applied Linguistics under Discourse Analysis and the method of data collection included retrival from website (that is the JSC website). The instrument of data collection was an extraction guide/check list. A coding sheet was used to label the features and data was analyzed qualitatively using conceptual content analysis.The research is an important linguistic endeavour that would create an awarenes among members of the public, linguistic scholars and those concerned with the vetting process. The findings in the present research revealed that some of the linguistic, rhetoric and move features used in job interviews carried out by the JSC attempted to express or enhance positive values . However, some features tended to violate, contravene and contradict the same values. The recommendations made emphasised the need to analyse other linguistic components in order to discover whether language is an appropriate tool that ccould be used to improve the Kenyan judiciary.